In Indonesia there exists more than 300 native languages, most of them limited to smaller regions. This most likely comes from Indonesia being spread over more than 17.000 islands that had limited communication between each other in the past.

To cope with the problem of communication in the country, Bahasa Indonesian, Bahasa meaning language, was made the official language of Indonesia when Indonesia was declared independent in 1945. Bahasa Indonesian, or Indonesian for short, is a derivate of Malay, like many other languages in South East Asia.

Bahasa Indonesian has been influenced by a lot of other languages, especially the Dutch. And as part of the Dutch language is clearly built from other languages, as a European it can sometimes be easy to see the resemblance of words. For example the word for towel in Swedish is handduk, in Bahasa Indonesian it is handuk.

Most Indonesians don’t use Bahasa Indonesian as their primary language but most of them know it and use it regularly. Here on Gili Meno including Lombok and surroundings the regional language is Sasak, which is also the name of the people living here.